Steve Gets A Life

am steve?

when did i become a morning person? i seem to be making the transformation. last night i accidentally set the alarm an hour early (actually, i set the time an hour ahead) and ended up showered and in the middle of breakfast by 6 am. whoops. decided to take advantage and got into work at 7:15 am to give me time to make sure all the labs i updated over the weekend didn't wind up totally broken. fixed a few minor things and by the time i was back in my office, it was 8 am.
right on time, nothing to do.

24 rules

i dont know how better to put it. 24 is the best show ever.
im pretty sure that if i somehow found myself in the military instead of college and i didn't have moral qualms with killing people, id totally be a special ops dude. i wanna say stuff like "im going dark" and "ill volunteer, im trained to do that too."
i think its along the same lines of thought that made me want to be a ninja when i was seven and makes me love video games that let you be a sniper (counterstrike, splinter-cell, rainbow six, etc).

---

on iTunes: Little One from the album "Sea Change" by Beck

the trouble with spring break

there's so much potential to get stuff done, but there's such an air of laziness about. nobody around, awesome weather, long lunches. but at the same time, the students are out of the way, which gives me room to wipe out all the machines, bring them all up to speed, making my life a little easier once they all get back. so. ya, thats it.

---

on iTunes: Break Away by John Mayer

anime eyes

i cant even read what im typing right now.
just went tot he eye doctor.
my pupils are as big as plates. now i know how gollum must feel.

sand art

this movie is awesome. you'll need the latest windows media player to view it.

amazing, and a little crazy

if you want some adventure, just check out this site and follow their lead.
man, riding a bike cross-country. it doesn't sound that crazy, but i think it actually might be insane. or awesome.

blogroll, opml, etc

made a blogroll out of my subscriptions using NetNewsWire. exported the list into an OPML file and then found, modified, and used a simple perl script to generate the final product. this link will on the right side of the page from now on.
now just to automate this process ;)

---

on iTunes: A Farewell to Kings from the album "Chronicles Disc 1" by Rush

sorta cool

apparently my chinese name might be "Mao Xiantian" according to this site:
Surname (first character): Mao

Given Name (middle character): Xian ("refined")

Given Name (last character): tian ("quiet, calm, tranquil, peaceful")
based on the questions asked, this is pretty much a random selection of characters, id say.

career change... err, start?

so i just finished up my resume that i've supposedly been working on for a month. it just takes a good hour or two to get it straight in your head, then it all comes together. i'd also like to congratulate myself of graduating to the amazing two page resume. sure, a few jobs are sort of "filler" but hey, thats cool.
after finishing that up, i went ahead and even applied to a few jobs at livermore. some were pretty rad: security officer, PKI development, etc. would be pretty neat, thats for sure. i should probably start applying at other places too, hm.

---

on iTunes: Its Good To Be King by Tom Petty

"Bush's war on truth"

check out this recent salon article (get the "day pass" to read the whole thing, you just have to sit through an ad).
essentially, bush and his cronies are calling out kerry in regards to not wanting to use the word "war." and its totally out of context, therefore irrelevant. its almost like gossip: someone overheard part of kerry's speech and passed it onto the republicans who are using it without actually checking the context. jeez.

statistics can be counter-intuitive

i paste this here simply because i think its a great example (albeit probably overly-used) on how statistics are useful and sometimes enlightening and counter-intuitive. this was taken from the wikipedia
False positives in a medical test
False positives are a problem in any kind of test: no test is perfect, and sometimes the test will incorrectly report a positive result. For example, if a test for a particular disease is performed on a patient, then there is a chance (usually small) that the test will return a postive result even if the patient does not have the disease. The problem lies, however, not just in the chance of a false positive prior to testing, but determining the chance that a positive result is in fact a false positive. As we will demonstrate, using Bayes' theorem, if a condition is rare, then the majority of positive results may be false positives, even if the test for that condition is (otherwise) reasonably accurate.
Suppose that a test for a particular disease has a very high success rate:

• if a tested patient has the disease, the test accurately reports this, a 'positive', 99% of the time (or, with probability 0.99), and
  
• if a tested patient does not have the disease, the test accurately reports that, a 'negative', 95% of the time (i.e. with probability 0.95).

Suppose also, however, that only 0.1% of the population have that disease (i.e. with probability 0.001). We now have all the information required to use Bayes' theorem to calculate the probability that, given the test was positive, that it is a false positive.
Let A be the event that the patient has the disease, and B be the event that the test returns a positive result. Then, using the second form of Bayes' theorem (above), the probability of a true positive is

and hence the probability of a false positive is about  (1 - 0.019) = 0.981.
Despite the apparent high accuracy of the test, the incidence of the disease is so low (one in a thousand) that the vast majority of patients who test positive (98 in a hundred) do not have the disease. (Nonetheless, this is 20 times the proportion before we knew the outcome of the test! The test is not useless, and re-testing may improve the reliability of the result.) In this case, Bayes' theorem helps show that the accuracy of tests for rare conditions must be very high in order to produce reliable results from a single test, due to the possibility of false positives.

tech support sucks

so i think i might hate my job. well, im sure i hate it sometimes. and its not often i come home elated about my day at the office.
but what really gets me is the lack of respect i get from students. i hope i wasn't like this to the tech guys when i was in college (considering i was basically already doing the same job as them, i really hope not).
i get students walking in (five minutes before their project is due) saying "whats wrong with the printers?" uhhh.... well considering you're the first one to come complain to me about it, and i don't spend my time watching the printers, waiting for something to fail, id have to say "i don't know, what is wrong with them?" "well they aren't working" .... i go, find that the paper is out. apparently posting a giant poster saying how to troubleshoot printers is totally ineffective when there is a "computer guy" available to but for little things like that.
but i digress. what really gets me is when the students put on the whole "um ya, could you take care of that? like yesterday? cause i have a class in five minutes and its really important and i didn't do it earlier cause i was printing out pictures of my mardi gras party then. oh ya, and you can't possibly have better things to be doing, so would you wipe my nose for me too?"
i think i need to bring my degreeS in here and hang them on the wall. maybe that will help. no way.
so it doesn't bother me that i spent an hour of my day working on my resume today. cause i need to get the f outta here.

what is a blog

i found a very good article that essentially sums up what this whole "blogging" thing is all about, and why its taking off like it is. one of my favorite insights:

So why all the excitement? Everybody seems to have one and yet a weblog feels more like a pet rock than a revolution. We are particularly reminded of the excitement that accompanied the explosion of home pages in the early days of the Web. We suspect that, like home pages, the appearance of so many weblogs isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is, rather, the pervasive use of a set of technologies.

ive had an idea in my head for about a year now for a piece of software involving blogging. i think i really should move on it, as it seems the time is ripe.
that explains my interest in Objective-C these days.

lost?

here's a map (as taken from the mars rover "spirit")

google can git ya

check out this article about finding passwords on google.
i did. and i found some encrypted passwords. and i decrypted 4 of them in under 5 minutes (one in less than a second). just something to be paranoid about if you start a website and don't know what you're doing.

back to training

i ran yesterday for the first time in probably six months. i think the last time i ran was the SB Triathlon and i can't even remember when that was, but i know it felt like summer.
i strapped on the HRM, donned my trusted running shoes with those wacky elastic laces, stepped out the door into what might have been the best running weather possible. not cold, not warm, somewhere in between. it was about 6pm on the first hot day of the year and it just started cooling off. i trotted down the hill towards the high school. instead of stopping at the red light, i turned up Monterey, towards the hotels. as soon as there were no cars, i jay-ran and then cut back towards my initial destination. When i arrived at the high school, i decided to run to the back, through The Perfect Neighborhood. I found myself crawling through a hole in the fence onto school property when my watch said i was about 6 minutes into my run. a perfect time to stop and stretch out, now that i had warmed up.
i started back up within a minute or so and went straight uphill to the "S L" on the hill overlooking the high school. i discovered that running on loose, bumpy soil wasn't the easiest with elastic laces. running along the side of the hill, i practically rolled my shoes around my feet several times. i reached the "S L" quickly and took a breather (uphill running is pretty tough even if it isn't your first time back out). the view was incredible. i could see most of downtown SLO, the mountains, almost to the ocean. i could even see my house from there.
i took a longer way home, through the school, around the track once (in 1:35, pathetic), and back onto the street. i did an even out-and-back, with a good 5 minutes of walking at the end to cool down. a good re-entry into training, i think.

return of the sun

im wearing shorts right now. i rode my bike to work. i want to get back outside and off this computer.
after months of so-so weather and some downright cruddy weather, california's central coast brings back the goods.
andria and i went down to SB for the first annual ucsb triathlon. it went extremely well, very smooth. i helped manage the timing and some general coordination, but didn't have any actual responsibilities. which was nice. we couldn't have asked for better weather. the day was perfect for a ocean swim, a bike ride around goleta, and a run around the UCSB lagoon. big mike sevier won the race (of course), cause he's the man.
next weekend the parents are coming in from around the state for a round-table on the whole wedding thing. cal poly will be hosting the cal poly triathlon that weekend as well, and there is a century in solvang. it looks like spring has sprung and things are starting to happen again 'round these parts. finally.
oh, we (intentionally) bumped into my sister kathleen while in SB, she and her friends were in town revisiting their glory days in IV. had some woodstocks and compared sunburns, then we were off to SLO, showed them around a bit and finally got home for some well-deserved rest.

HP's blog epidemic analyzer

this is a pretty neat tool. you can look up topics to find commonly blogged stories, then get the graph on how that story grew through "blogspace." essentially telling you who initially wrote about the story and who is copying each other (for example, im copying slashdot).
the graphs are pretty neat and the faq mentions they have developed a ranking algorithm to discover these "originator" nodes as the best result, as opposed to maybe a well-read, oft-linked site that copied that originating node.

two videos and some thoughts on HCI for you

first off are the sony robots doing a "fan dance". they're so smooth its creepy.
next is an older video put out by Apple about its idea of the future "Knowledge Navigator." this idea of a personal assistant was presented in the past as the ultimate in personal computing, but as this article points out, it can only be just that, the ultimate.
it will never work in the interim because as these avatars act more and more human, we expect more and more out of them. when they do not deliver, we quickly abandon them. thus, the only avatar that would ever succeed would be a perfect one. while the idea of avatars might appeal as the ideal HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) device, i doubt it will ever arrive without the ability to evolve.

the future business of computer security and insurance

Christopher Allen, a name I'd never heard before reading this article (ah the power of blogs) posted an interesting writeup on the state of the computer security industry and its potential futures. check it out here.
The idea of moving away from selling security through FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) is great, im all for it. Merging with insurance schemes might be a way to ensure that security sticks around, avoiding the need to sell a product, as in the case of RSA, et al. I really think that security firms like counterpane will become more popular. as more companies need security, more firms will pop up to take the call. companies can not rely on in-house security for long. when a super-worm gets released, who will be better prepared? the company with the guys on the 2nd floor with the firewall-appliance, or the company working with a managed security company that takes preventative measures on all its clients as soon as it recognizes a threat against one of them?
in a business sense, eventually computer security will be much like physical security. companies all have insurance. those that have hired security firms will pay less for their premiums, whether they are insuring their building or their data.

blog (and other site) readers

there's a little something out there called RSS. if you've ever seen a site with a little orange XML icon , you've seen it.
what is it good for? well, i use it to read tons of blogs/news sites/etc in a fraction of the regular time using a "site aggregator" like NetNewsWireLite (Mac) or FeedDemon (PC).
If you click on the screenshot to the right, you can see an example of what the programs do. pretty cool.
So if you install one of these programs, you can simply visit a site you normally read, drag the icon onto the aggregator, and boom! you're using RSS.

security codes on comments

ive added a feature on the blog that requires you to type in a security code when commenting. this should cut down on the spam comments ive been getting (ive been deleting them right away, so all you regular readers probably didn't even notice. wait, you don't exist) so if there is any problem commenting, be sure to let me know via email.

get your brightroom pics quick

attention triathlon-computer-geeks:
using a unix (OSX works if you install wget from fink) machine, you can automate getting pictures of yourself from brightroom.com. im only talking about the low-res ones on their website, not the real-deal ones you pay for, of course.
first, find the site with your pics on it. go to the main page, search for your event, then your bib or name. when you get to a page with your pics on it, run the command:
wget -nd -P pics/ -p --accept .jpg --span-hosts "PUT_URL_HERE" (of course, substitute the URL in).
for example, i used wget -nd -P pics/ -p --accept .jpg --span-hosts "http://www.brightroom.com/view_user_event.asp?EVENTID=3426&BIB=942&PWD="